This little thought experiment reveals why Cancel Culture affects you even if you don’t believe you’ll ever be canceled or threatened with cancellation. Its most profound harm for society as a whole — besides, perhaps, how it undermines interpersonal trust and is often simply merciless and cruel — is that it undermines trust in experts.

When even a single thinker is punished for their academic opinion or for engaging in thought experimentation, it leads the public to be justifiably skeptical that any expert on that topic is being fully honest. For example, if even a single professor, like Carole Hooven at Harvard, lands in hot water for arguing that biological sex is real and important, that would, for obvious reasons, undermine the public’s trust in anybody claiming that it isn’t. After all, given the incentives and the climate of either conformity or cancellation, would a professor even tell you if they thought otherwise?